The foundation starts with a beat. A heartbeat. A steady rhythm. The tap-tap-tap that carries on even after the person who set the pace is gone. Many many too many heartbeats have stilled in the last short while. There are two in particular who today I think of who were mixed into the concrete of my foundation in ways they didn’t know, because we barely knew each other.

In 1984 I moved to NYC from SoCal to keep building myself. I wanted my own room as a music writer, an interviewer of musicians, a deep diver in some music mayhem. I packed up my typewriter, tucked away my first interview (Lee Ving, Fear, conducted on a big black rotary phone, appeared in CalState Long Beach newspaper. Although I can’t find it now.), and sorted myself on the Lower East Side. I dated a drummer in a band called Three Teens Kill Four, their band name coming from an infamous New York Post headline. The city was gritty. The mayor was Koch. I lived on Stanton Street between Norfolk and Suffolk with a roommate. We had the whole floor and I would sit on the fire escape looking down on the street listening to the street. Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz was the read during my first summer in that apartment and I could relate. (People trapped in bad relationships because of New York’s impossible real estate.) The Village Voice came out every Wednesday, and people would show up at the newsstand on Cooper Union at midnight in order to get a copy so as to scour available apartments. I felt pretty fortunate to have landed in mine. The sounds from the fire escape told me how things were changing though: a block toward the East River an abandoned building was where heroin lived. A steady stream of weebles wobbling, until one day punch&judy showed up. High-wire crack turned nods into gnashing. A night I woke up to screams outside my window, a woman yelling for help. Dragging the rotary phone to the window, I opened it and screamed “I’m calling the police” as a squad car pulled up and a man ran away. Into the kitchen for a drink to calm my nerves and the sounds of pots&pans across the courtyard (where on Saturdays there were cockfights). I felt comforted that someone was up, maybe making a tasty treat in the wee hours. Then I heard “Fire. Fire” and realized the sound was not a midnight snack but a panic attack. But still. My building stood and right alongside. There was a magazine at the time, Details, started by Annie Flanders. It was the voice of my world. The stories of my New York. The hubris&hum of the streets I walked and where I felt I’d become. CBGB for the first time (don’t remember who I saw, only remember the smell, the humid sensations of the place). Gem Spa for a vanilla egg cream. The Pyramid Club for dancing on the bar and bands in the back room. All laying down the steady beat of my days.

Some decades later, my feet had fallen on those streets hundreds, thousands of times. The foundation was pretty damn strong. I’d felt a lot of beats move me in clubs all over the city. It was November 2000 and the Foo Fighters were playing at Roseland Ballroom. I’d left (run actually) from the music industry a few years before and this was the first time I was seeing an old friend with his new band. It was transcendent, not just because the band is so damn propulsive and present, but also because for me it was like being somewhere I’d never been while at the same time recognizing the front door. Afterward, there was a gathering at their hotel and I had with me a Polaroid camera (I’d just gone on the road with the band Bush, where the premise had been candid Polaroids). Two things stand out in my memory: 1) Winona Ryder telling me a story about how she was on a plane overseas and had to turn around and come home because she was emotionally wrecked from a recent breakup and me thinking how surreal it was that I knew she was talking about pulling out of The Godfather Part III after her breakup with Johnny Depp and that I was pretending she was just any old Josephina confiding a story one gal to another. Number 2 standout was the wide-open wonderful of Taylor Hawkins, who I’d never met before. His being. His complete and utter presence as someone who supported (as drummers do) while also partook (as confident musicians do). He seemed a fun-as-hell goofball. Somewhere in a storage box in NYC is the Polaroid I took of him across the table on the balcony full-body grinning to light up the sky.

And now, under that same sky, the sidewalks and songs are the things that hold Annie’s and Taylor’s beat. Always.